This invention relates to a method for managing maintenance of equipment. More particularly, this invention relates to a method for managing maintenance of equipment by a maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) business organization.
Historically, within MRO business organizations, resource planning has been performed as a product of resource availability within a very near term time window, usually within weeks. The specific scheduling activity of maintenance tasks usually is the product of responding to emergencies and matters of necessities to keep a particular end item, or a piece of equipment, in service. The result is that maintenance schedules often serve as general guidelines with critical resources being poorly allocated. Those resources typically need to be continually swapped and reallocated in an ad hoc manner to meet the emergency maintenance needs. This informality often results in both excessive equipment down times and excessive cost of maintenance.
Accomplishment of maintenance plans can often be measured in multiples of originally forecast expenditures, both in time and money. Much of this lost efficiency is the product of inadequate communication of facts as they are known or become known, inadequate strength of predicted work analysis and attempts to adhere to non-applicable schedules and allocation profiles.
Compounding the planning scheduling and allocation problem is the reality that knowledge about the piece of equipment that is going to be maintained is often rudimentary and presumptive as opposed to being clearly defined. The impact that discovery of actual equipment configurations or mismatched configurations has on planning, scheduling and allocation processes is impressive. In highly technical end item maintenance, these mismatches coupled with the additive tasks, also known as “emergent” work, which emerge as “over and above” work to be formed, can account for between 50 and 80 percent of the total maintenance tasks performed. This provides a solid indication of the reason that planning, scheduling and allocation processes that occur before the start of the maintenance execution activities are typically so far “off base” with the reality of the tasks.
Additionally, MRO difficulties result when the specific nature of the scheduling problem is not well understood and schedules are developed on a one-size fits all basis. Using aircraft maintenance as an illustration, the scheduling needs for line maintenance differ dramatically from hangar maintenance. Neither one relates well to back shop schedule requirements. But all three of line, hangar and back shop maintenance must be harmonized and balanced to achieve the total end goal for an airline, which is 100 percent safe and compliant aircraft, on-time, and at an appropriate cost. If the required maintenance methodologies for the different locations are not recognized or accommodated, the resulting maintenance schedule may not be useful or applicable.
Accordingly, there is a need in a MRO business organization for the planning, scheduling and allocation of the required resources needed for the maintenance to be performed in a robust and integrated fashion with the ability to replan, reschedule, and reallocate those resources based on an exceptionally dynamic set of requirements which come from within the control of the MRO business as well as external sources.